.music and .gay CPE probe could end this month

An ICANN-commissioned investigation into the fairness of its Community Priority Evaluation process for new gTLDs could wind up before the end of June.
In an update Friday, ICANN also finally revealed who is actually conducting the probe, which has been slammed by affected applicants for being secretive.
A tentative timeline sketched out in the update means applicants for gTLDs including .gay and .music could find their applications closer to release from limbo in just a few weeks.
ICANN revealed that FTI Consulting’s Global Risk and Investigations Practice and Technology Practice have been looking into claims ICANN staff meddled in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s supposedly independent CPE reviews for the last several months.
FTI is reviewing how ICANN staff interacted with the EIU during the CPE processes, how the EIU conducted its research and whether the EIU applied the CPE criteria uniformly across different gTLDs.
ICANN said that FTI finished collected material from ICANN in March and hopes to have all the information it has asked the EIU for by the end of this week.
It could deliver its findings to ICANN two weeks after that, ICANN said.
Presumably, there would be little to prevent ICANN publishing these findings very shortly thereafter.
ICANN has been harangued by some of the applicants for .music, .gay, hotel, .cpa, .llc, .inc, .llp and .merck, all of which have been affected by controversial CPE decisions and have been delayed by the investigation, for months.

Comment Tagged: .cpa, .gay, .hotel, .inc, .llc, .llp, .music, community, cpe, eiu, fti consulting, ICANN, merck

Time to show ICANN who’s boss!

You are in charge of ICANN.
That statement may sound trite — it is trite — but it’s always been true to some extent.
Even if their individual voices are often lost, members of the ICANN community have always had the ability to influence policy, whether through sporadic responses to public comment periods or long term, soul-crushing working group volunteer work.
ICANN only really has power through community consent.
That’s another trite statement, but one which became more true on October 1 last year, when ICANN separated itself from US government oversight and implemented a new set of community-created bylaws.
The new bylaws created a new entity, the “Empowered Community”, which essentially replaced the USG and is able to wield more power than the ICANN board of directors itself.
Indeed, the Empowered Community can fire the entire board if it so chooses; a nuclear option for the exercise of community control that never existed before.
And the EC is, at the ICANN 59 public meeting in Johannesburg at the end of the month, about to get its first formal outing.
What the EC will discuss is pretty dull stuff. That’s why I had to trick you into reading this post with an outrageous, shameless, sensationalist headline.
Before getting into the substance of the Johannesburg meeting, I’m going to first bore you further for several paragraphs by attempting to answering the question: “What exactly is the Empowered Community?”
The EC exists an an “unincorporated association” under California law, ICANN deputy general counsel Sam Eisner told me.
It doesn’t have shareholders, directors, staff, offices… you wouldn’t find it by searching California state records. But it would have legal standing to take ICANN to court, should the need arise.
It was basically created by the new ICANN bylaws.
It comprises the five major constituencies of ICANN — the Generic Names Supporting Organization, the Country Code Names Supporting Organization, the Governmental Advisory Committee, the At-Large Advisory Committee and the Address Supporting Organization.
They’re called “Decisional Participants” and each is represented on a committee called the EC Administration by a single representative.
Right now, each group is represented on the Administration by its respective chair — GNSO Council chair James Bladel of GoDaddy represents the GNSO currently, for example — but I gather that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case; each group can decide how it appoints its rep.
Bladel tells me that each representative only takes action or casts a vote after being told to do so by their respective communities. As individuals, their power is extremely limited.
When the EC makes decisions, there must always be at least three votes in favor of the decision and no more than one vote against. A 3-1 vote would count as approval, a 3-2 vote would not.
This is to make sure that there is a fairly high degree of consensus among stakeholders while also preventing one community stonewalling the rest for strategic purposes.
The EC’s nine powers are enumerated in article 6.2 of the ICANN bylaws.
It can hire and fire an unlimited number of directors, reject the ICANN budget, file Requests for Reconsideration or Independent Review Process appeals, sue ICANN, and oversee changes to the ICANN bylaws.
Most of these powers are reactive — that is, if the ICANN board did something terrible the EC would have to consciously decide to act upon it in some way.
But one of them — approval of changes to Fundamental Bylaws — places the EC squarely in the legislative pathway. Think of it like the Queen of England’s Royal Assent or the US president’s ability to veto bills before they become law.
That’s the role the EC will adopt in Joburg this month.
The ICANN board recently passed a resolution calling for a new board committee to be created to focus on handling accountability mechanisms such as Reconsideration, removing the function from the overworked Board Governance Committee.
Because this requires a change to a Fundamental Bylaw — those bylaws considered so important they need more checks and balances — the EC has been called upon to give it the community’s formal consent.
To the best of my knowledge, the bylaws amendment is utterly uncontroversial. I haven’t heard of any objections or complaints about what essentially seems to be a probably beneficial tweak in how ICANN’s board functions.
But it will be the EC’s first formal exercise of executive power.
So there will be a session at ICANN 59 in which the EC convenes to discuss the board’s resolution and, probably, hear any input it has not already heard.
The exact format of the session seems to be up in the air at the moment, but I gather an open-mic “public forum” style meeting of about an hour is the most likely choice. It will of course be webcast, with remote participation, as almost all ICANN public meetings are.
No votes will be cast at the session — I’m told the bylaws actually forbid it — but the EC will have only 21 days afterwards to poll their communities and formally deliver their verdict. Assuming at least three of the communities consent to the board resolution and no more than one objects, it will automatically become ICANN law.
The next test of the EC, which would prove to be actually newsworthy enough to write about without a clickbait headline, may well be the ICANN budget. ICANN’s financial year ends at the end of June, and the EC has explicit powers to reject it.
The budget often raises concerns from those parties who actually pay into it, and given the difficulties the industry is in right now there may be more concerns than usual.
Anyway, this is the way ICANN works nowadays. It would make for more interesting reading if a triumvirate of Iran, China and Russia now ran the show, but they don’t. You lot do.
Just be glad Donald Trump isn’t holding the reins.
Sorry, that was also trite, wasn’t it.

1 Comment Tagged: accountability, bgc, empowered community, ICANN, icann 59, johannesburg, reconsideration, rfr

.xyz sets price for numeric domains at $0.65

XYZ.com has announced that it will charge just $0.65 wholesale for over a billion numeric domain names in .xyz.
The revelation came as part of a confusing launch of what the registry calls its “1.111B Class” domains.
That’s because the pricing affects all 1.111 billion numerical domains of six, seven, eight and nine digits in .xyz.
These will now all register and renew for $0.65 or a recommended $0.99 retail.
That’s the same price that regular alphanumeric .xyz domains are selling at at many registrars, but the pricing for the 1.111B names is said to be fixed forever; it’s not a temporary promotion.
The announcement was themed on a take on the 16-year-old “All Your Base” meme and a white paper (pdf) written in the color scheme and typeface of a 1990s Unix terminal.
There’s a whole lot of fluff involved, but the gist of it appears to be that XYZ thinks these domains have value, when registered in bulk, to do stuff like address “Internet of Things” devices. The white paper states:

With the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), the 1.111B Class serves as a platform to easily and uniquely identify different devices, ranging from laptops to smart thermostats. In fact, registrants can even secure tens, hundreds, thousands to millions of domains in sequential order to create a block. These blocks can match device serial numbers or vehicle VIN numbers, then be used as portals for consumers to connect with their products, and for their products to receive updates from manufacturers.

There are of course far cheaper ways to go about this, such as using subdomains of an existing branded domain (which would have the added benefit of semantic value).
XYZ also talks in vague terms about these cheap domains being similar to Bitcoin, with reference to how Chinese domainers trade worthless domains as a kind of virtual currency.
I must confess I don’t get this idea at all. In my mind, owning a domain that has no possibility of an end-user buyer is more of a liability that an asset.
Still, it’s interesting to see a registry attempting to market domains for non-traditional purposes, so I’m curious to see how it plays out.

1 Comment Tagged: .xyz, 1.111b, new gTLDs, xyz.com

Sixteen-year-old emoji .com sells for €3,400

An emoji domain name believed to be in the first three such domains ever registered has been sold.
The domain ☮.com (xn--v4h.com) seems to to have been sold to an end-user buyer, via Sedo, for €3,400 ($3,816). The sale appears to have been a quick flip by an Austrian investor.
☮ is of course better known as a symbol representing peace, most associated with campaigns for nuclear disarmament.
The name now redirects to Sonshi.com, an “educational resource for Sun Tzu’s The Art of War”. The owner explains:

As students of Sun Tzu, we understand the objective of understanding warfare is peace. Even when we are forced to do battle, we want to end it quickly. If possible, it is best to prevent fighting altogether. There are few symbols that represent peace and are as recognizable as ☮.

According to research carried out by domain investor Michael Cyger, ☮.com is one of the three oldest emoji domains, after a “hot spring” symbol in .com and .net, all having been registered April 19, 2001.
It’s not a knock-your-socks-off price, given the scarcity of emoji domains and the age of the registration, but it seems to show there are buyers out there.
Emoji domains were recently discouraged by ICANN’s security committee due to the potential for security risks, and are currently effectively banned in new gTLDs.

13 Comments Tagged: aftermarket, emoji, sedo, sonshi.com

$5 billion e-commerce site to dump .com for dot-brand

The online ticketing arm of the French national railway operator SNCF has revealed plans to migrate away from .com to its dot-brand gTLD, .sncf.
The web site voyages-sncf.com will become oui.sncf in November, the company has confirmed following press reports at the weekend.
The existing site, despite the cumbersome domain, processed €4.3 billion ($4.8 billion) of ticket and other sales in 2015.
That number was reportedly down slightly last year due to the impact of the various terrorist attacks on the continent.
Still, it’s one of France’s most visible online brands, and has been around since 2000. The site is also available in other European languages and via mobile apps.
The new domain, oui.sncf, is already online. It currently redirects to an FAQ about the rebrand, at the .com site
Parent company SNCF is France’s government-owned rail operator, with overall revenue of €32.3 billion ($36 billion).
While ICANN’s new gTLD program produced hundreds of dot-brands, only a handful to date have moved substantially away from their original domains.

11 Comments Tagged: dot-brands, new gTLDs, sncf

Three-million-domain .au deal up for grabs

auDA has formally launched the process that will could see it replace .au back-end provider Neustar with an in-house registry by the end of June 2018.
The Australian ccTLD operator has opened a “Request for Expressions of Interest” as the first stage of a procurement process for software and/or services to support its recently announced Registry Transformation Project.
It’s looking for companies that can provide all the major pieces of a domain name registry — EPP registry, Whois, DNS, etc — and my reading of the REOI reveals a preference towards a system owned and operated by auDA.

Respondents can respond with products, technology and / or services for all or part of the elements of the Registry Transformation Project, and are free to partner with other respondents to put together combined proposals.
auDA intends to establish a dedicated .au registry, and have all arrangements in place to support this, by 30 June 2018.

The organization even talks about eventually becoming one of ICANN’s approved Emergency Back-End Registry Operators.
.au has grown to over 3 million domains over the 15 years it was being managed by AusRegistry, which was acquired by US-based Neustar in 2015. This deal is due to expire next year.
So it’s a big contract, and one that is likely to attract a lot of interest from players big and small.
That said, registry solutions are typically offered very much on a service basis. The market for licensed registry software is not exactly bustling, and auDA also requires source code access as a condition of any deal.
auDA said the deadline for responses to the REOI is June 26. It will decide upon its next steps, which could be a formal request for proposals, in the last week of July.
Further details can be found here.

Comment Tagged: .au, auda, ausregistry, back-end, neustar, rfp

Emoji domains get a 👎 from security panel

The use of emojis in domain names has been discouraged by ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee.
In a paper late last week, SSAC told ICANN that emojis — aka emoticons or smileys — lack standardization, are barred by the relevant domain name technical standards, and could cause user confusion.
Emoji domains, while technically possible, are not particularly prevalent on the internet right now.
They’re implicitly banned in gTLDs due to the contractual requirement to adhere to the IDNA2008 standard, which restricts internationalized domain names to actual spoken human languages, and the only ccTLD I’m aware of actively marketing the names is Samoa’s .ws.
There was a notable example of Coca Cola registering 😀.ws (xn--h28h.ws) for a billboard marketing campaign in Puerto Rico a couple of years ago, but that name has since expired and been registered by an Australian photographer.
The SSAC said that emoji use should be banned in TLDs and discouraged at the second level for several reasons.
Mainly, the problem is that while emojis are described in the Unicode standards, there’s no standardization across devices and applications as to how they are displayed.
A certain degree of creative flair is permitted, meaning a smiling face in one app may look unlike the technically same emoji in another app. On smaller screens and with smaller fonts, technically different emojis may look alike.
This could lead to confusion, which could lead to security problems, SSAC warns:

It is generally difficult for people to figure out how to specify exactly what happy face they are trying to produce, and different systems represent the same emoji with different code points. The shape and color of emoji can change while a user is viewing them, and the user has no way of knowing whether what they are seeing is what the sender intended. As a result, the user is less likely to reach the intended resource and may instead be tricked by a phishing site or other intentional misrepresentation.

SSAC added that it:

strongly discourages the registration of any domain name that includes emoji in any of its labels. The SSAC also advises registrants of domain names with emoji that such domains may not function consistently or may not be universally accessible as expected

The brief paper can be read here (pdf).

Comment Tagged: emoji, emojis, ICANN, idns, ssac

Web.com in takeover talks – report

Web.com is in talks to be acquired by private equity firms, according to a report.
Reuters reported last night that the registrar said the talks were “early stage” and that there was no guarantee of a deal.
Web.com is of course home to Network Solutions, Register.com and is involved in secondary market plays SnapNames and NameJet.
The company had 2016 revenue of $710 million and a market capitalization prior to the report of $1.1 billion. Its shares surged on the news.

Comment Tagged: acquisition, web.com

After price hike, now Tucows drops support for Uniregistry TLDs

Tucows is to drop OpenSRS support for nine Uniregistry gTLDs after the registry announced severe price increases.
The registrar told OpenSRS resellers that it will no longer support .audio, .juegos, .diet, .hiphop, .flowers, .guitars, .hosting, .property and .blackfriday from September 8, the date the increases kick in.
It’s the second major registrar, after GoDaddy, to drop support for Uniregistry TLDs in the wake of the pricing news.
“The decision to discontinue support for these select TLDs was made to protect you and your customers from unknowingly overpaying in a price range well beyond $100 per year,” OpenSRS told its resellers.
It will continue to support seven other Uniregistry gTLDs, including .click and .link, which are seeing more modest price increases and will remain at $50 and under.
While Tucows is a top 10 registrar in most affected TLDs, its domains under management across the nine appears to be under 3,000.
These domains will expire at their scheduled expiry date and OpenSRS will not allow their renewal after the September 8 cut-off. Customers will be able to renew at current prices for one to 10 years, however.
Tucows encouraged its roughly 40,000 resellers to offer to migrate their customers to other TLDs.
Uniregistry revealed its price increases in March, saying moving to a premium-pricing model was necessary to make the gTLDs profitable given the lack of volume.
Pricing for .juegos and .hosting is to go up from under $20 retail to $300. The other seven affected gTLDs will increase from the $10 to $25 range to $100 per year.
After GoDaddy pulled support for Uniregistry TLDs, the registry modified its plan to enable all existing registrations to renew at current prices.
That clearly was not enough for Tucows, which has sent a pretty clear message that it’s not prepared to be the public face of such significant price hikes.

4 Comments Tagged: .audio, .blackfriday, .diet, .flowers, .guitars, .hiphop, .juegos, .property, hosting, new gTLDs, opensrs, tucows, uniregistry

Country names to finally be released in new gTLDs

It looks like hundreds of domain names matching the names of countries are to finally get released from ICANN limbo.
The ICANN board last week passed a resolution calling for the organization to clear a backlog of over 60 registry requests to start selling or using country and territory names in their gTLDs.
Some of the requests date back to 2014. They’ve all been stuck in red tape while ICANN tried to make sure members of the Governmental Advisory Committee was cool with the names being released.
The result of these three years of pondering is scrappy, but will actually allow some names to hit the market this year.
The new resolution calls for ICANN to “take all steps necessary to grant ICANN approvals for the release of country and territory names at the second-level”, but only “to the extent the relevant government has indicated its approval”.
And that’s the catch.
Some governments, such as the US and UK, don’t care who registers matching names. Dozens of others want to vet each registry request on a case-by-case basis.
The wishes of each government are record in a GAC database.
The only territories to so far give a blanket waiver over their names are: Denmark, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, the UK, the USA, Guernsey and Pitcairn.
Almost 70 other countries have said they need to be told when a registry wants to sell a domain matching their name. Ten others give carte blanche to closed dot-brands, but require notification in the case of open gTLDs.
The majority of countries in the world have yet to officially express a preference one way or the other.
Of the roughly 60 new gTLD registries to request country name releases over the last few years, the vast majority are dot-brands. The number of open gTLDs with such requests appears to be in the single figures, and the only ones with mass-market appeal appear to be .xyz and .global.

2 Comments Tagged: country names, gac, ICANN, new gTLDs, rsep